Open Source Novel Authoring Tools

Open-source writing tool with hierarchical outliner, distraction-free editor, character management, plot development, Snowflake method, and writing goal support.

novelWriter is a Markdown-like text editor designed for writing novels and larger projects of many smaller plain text documents. It uses its own flavor of Markdown that supports a meta data syntax for comments, synopsis and cross-referencing between files.

Free offline worldbuilding and story creation tool with dozens of templates, complex tagging options, document linking, and project-wide search. Template examples: characters, places, events, religions, currencies, magic, species, languages.

A smooth yet powerful writing experience for devoted authors. With only wanted features and native workflow it runs faster than all your previous apps combined.

Focus on your words not the interface. Quoll Writer is a writing application that helps you focus on your words. Clean and uncluttered. Feature rich. Features are where you would expect them to be.

Desktop software for novel creation providing chapter and scene organization, export to PDF, DOCX, distraction-free writing, timeline, goals, and character tools.

A simple tool for building stories.

oStorybook is a free, open source novel-writing software for creative writers, novelists and authors which will help you to keep an overview of multiple plot-lines while writing texts.

Free, open-source writing app for plotters. Import your outline from Scrivener, Plottr, yWriter, or Obsidian — then draft with your scene beats, character notes, and story structure visible alongside your prose. No AI, no subscription, no cloud.

Skribisto is born from the ashes of Plume Creator , keeping the goals while adopting more recent ways to think an application.

Looking for a suite of tools for writing your book? This is not just a text editor it does so much more. Organise your story using timelines, planning boards and the snowflake tool, all integrated to make writing intuitive and fun.

Nulis makes the process of outlining your stories, articles, or books easy, fun, and convenient.

Scriptorium is an all-in-one book editing tool for GNOME.

WorldLoom is a application which allows user to create articles, maps, scenes and timelines to tell about their story. Afterwards user can extract their project as a wiki in website format.

An interactive Fiction Space Engine and application for creating and playing Interactive Fiction games (e.g.: Colossal Cave, Zork, Choose your path books) with no coding required.

A minimal text adventure engine.